This comment shows that even Ryan's version of Kilpatrick's fall is subject to the same skeptical scrutiny as any historical account. The list of storytellers within the historical narrative includes: the historical biographers of Kilpatrick, Shakespeare, and James Alexander Nolan, the writer and producer of Kilpatrick's elaborately staged assassination. Borges" notion of false history reveals itself through these three storytellers. Shakespeare fictionalizes the death of Julius Caesar as Nolan plagiarizes the plays of Shakespeare in creating his plan, and as the keepers of history record only the one-dimensional side of the events of a more deeply involved labyrinth. The interaction between the storytellers produces a tangled web of correspondences where truth and lies come together and the fiction of Shakespeare becomes factual. Borges illustrates the blurring of literary and historical value by writing, "that history should have copied history was already sufficiently astonishing; that history should copy literature was inconceivable" (73-74). Borges concludes that the moment the pen touches the paper it becomes an entity of its own and destroys the conventional ways of fiction and nonfiction. This means that a work of fiction could exist more factual than an extraordinary account of history. Ryan believes he has found the final truth behind Kilpatrick's fall but due to his oversight, his version is left to be scrutinized with the rest of history. Ryan is now trapped in a labyrinth where the report of either account fails to produce anything but another story. .
In "Three Versions of Judas," Borges logically proves Judas to be the Son of God as a way to show the accepted interpretations of the Gospel Story is not something we should blindly adhere to. Whereas "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero" examines storytelling as it relates to literature and history, "Three Versions of Judas" addresses the relationship between storytelling and interpretation in Scripture.
